


Is It Raining Where You Are?

by mullroy



Series: CSNB AU [3]
Category: Something Rotten! - Kirkpatrick/Kirkpatrick/O'Farrell
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2019-02-17 05:07:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13069776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mullroy/pseuds/mullroy
Summary: The Front Bottoms' "West Virginia" has been stuck in Shylock's head for about three days.





	Is It Raining Where You Are?

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally like, my favorite idea. It still has fun little shards of my favorite idea in there. But also I had to get this to a certain word count by a certain day for my beloved creative writing class and it nearly killed me, and so this story is irrevocably tied up with hellish stress in my mind. Frankly, it's bad and needs editing like a motherfucker. I cut half the bits that made it cool and made it make sense because I was strapped for time. One day, I hope to summon the will to edit it and fix it. Today is not that day, but I'm giving this to y'all anyway, because if you're reading Something Rotten Nostradamus/Shylock preslash in the first place this will probably be acceptable by your standards.

You could say that Chicago in the rain is gray and, technically speaking, you would be accurate. You would simply be implying an unfair level of monotony.

Chicago in the rain is static come to life. The buzzing hiss of water lays over everything like a current of electricity; the city’s life is thrown out of focus behind it. Lake Michigan starts to blur out of its bed, climbing into the sky on slabs of rain. It’s a silence where you feel like you need to yell to be heard. The air is sharp, cold, alive.

There are a lot of different colors of gray; gray is just the death throes of some other color. The rain is making a warm, heavy, lived-in gray out of warehouses that are usually brown, and a soft-edged, cool, dark gray out of the green of neighborhood landscaping.

The rain is also making an interesting sludge out of the ever-present mysterious gutter substances. Less satisfying than a good storm, but right now, when being back home is freshly wonderful, he loves the weird sweet-earth fragrance of heat-fermented wet garbage with equal enthusiasm.

Going to college in a small town is taking away his cynicism. That’s worrying.

He stands to stretch the shiver out of his shoulders and realizes that his thighs are damp. The chair was less dry than he thought. His hair, too, has somehow gotten wet enough to curl irritatingly into his eyes. You would think the balcony didn’t have an overhang.

There’s no point torturing himself with wet pajamas. He slips back through the balcony door, tracking wet leaves into the kitchen—he’ll get them when he comes back—and into his room. The warmth of the apartment feels too close after being out in the wind for so long, even as the space is disconcertingly empty. The walls of his room are a completely blank beige, which remains jarring the second summer he’s seen them empty. The posters and pictures that used to belong to this room are in storage in Cobalt, along with everything else that was used to furnish his dorm; it’s proved too much of a hassle to fit more than a duffel of his clothes onto his motorcycle for trips back and forth. The only furniture left for his first bedroom is a bed. It feels more like living in a rental than living in an actual rental did. At this point it may have gone beyond the “rental” vibe and fully into “hospital”.

He rifles through his duffel bag for several minutes before accepting that there are no comfortable pants hidden among the crumpled clothes. With some resignation, he puts on a pair of slacks. The things may technically be more formal than jeans, but they are both soft and just a bit too big for him, which essentially makes them sweatpants with a more complicated waistband. More importantly, neither his mother nor his grandmother will be home to make fun of his outfit choices for several hours, so he has time to do laundry. He has the house entirely to himself.

He starts a load of laundry. He mops his leaves off of the kitchen floor. The complete lack of hazardously old piles of dishes or takeout containers on the counters is nearly as disconcerting as the blankness of his room.

Having the house to himself is disconcerting.

He calls Tom.

After the fifth ring, there’s a small click and a sound, something like “mh?”, that might have been made by a person.

“…Tom?”

“Heya, Shylock.” There’s a rasping blur to his voice, like he just woke up, or like he hasn’t woken up yet at all. For a guilty, confused moment, Shylock wonders if the difference in time zone means he’s called ridiculously early. He looks, furtively, at the weird chef-shaped clock on the kitchen wall, then remembers two facts simultaneously: first, the Eastern time zone is later than Central (Michigan has three pm to Chicago’s two), and second, Tom more or less always sounds like this.

He asks “I didn’t wake you up, did I?” anyway.

“Nah, I’ve been awake since eight. What’s up?”

“I have to wait around the apartment for a delivery, but it’s empty and it’s setting me on edge.” That sounds a little stupid. He doesn’t actually care.

“So you called the most interesting person you know to provide creepy-emptiness-filling small talk?”

Shylock grins. “Something like that.”

“I’m up for it. How’s the weather?”

“Indescribably beautiful,” Shylock says. “Is it raining where you are?” It’s dangerous to quote lyrics like this, especially from a band that’s more Tom’s favorite than his own. If Tom notices, the quiet, good-natured smugness at having gotten someone else to enjoy his weird music taste will be unbearable. But sue him, the song has been stuck in his head for nearly a week now, and it fits the general topic of conversation.

“Hm. No.”

Well, at least he didn’t quote the next lyric back to him. Okay, Shylock might rather have had the lyric quote. It would have been less depressing. Really, Cobalt ought to share Chicago’s weather. It’s in a different time zone, but it’s barely 80 miles away. Hell, it’s on the shore of the same lake. Right now, it doesn’t feel like it’s in the same universe.

Into the silence, Tom says, somewhat contemplatively: “I wish it was.”

“You know, Chicago has really good bagels.” This is true, but he’s not sure why he’s saying it.

“And good rain?”

“That too. You want to come see it?” Oh. That’s what he meant.

“The bagels, or the rain?” Tom sounds like he’s grinning.

“Both. You might have to leave quick to catch the rain, though.”

Tom laughs. There’s a vague sustained rustling in the background, and when Tom finally speaks again, he’s far away from the phone. “Done!”

“…with?”

“Packing!”

Shylock raises an eyebrow at the phone. “Jeez, that was quick.”

“I don’t fuck around about bagels. HEY UNCLE MIKE, I’M GOIN’ TO CHICAGO FOR—hey Shy, how long am I going to Chicago for?”

Shylock huffs a laugh. “However long you like, dude.”

“—A FEW DAYS, BYE LOVE YOU.” There’s the sound of a door slamming, and when Tom speaks again it’s with the weird echo of a stairwell. “Okay, uh, cool, uh… see you in two hours?”

* * *

 

The first thing that Tom says when Shylock opens the door for him is “Hi!”. The second thing is “What’s the occasion?”

“What occasion?”

“Big ED’S Surf Co.,” Tom reads from Shylock’s t-shirt. “And… slacks?”

He’s… still wearing the slacks. Damn it. “It’s a new look I’m trying out. Come on, come in, you can stand in my living room while I go find jeans so we won’t get laughed out of the Bialy’s.”

He walks back into his room without making eye contact, leaving Tom to his own devices in the apartment’s excuse for a foyer while he hunts down a pair of jeans in the unfolded laundry piled on his bed.

When he comes back into the living room, Tom has made his way into the living room and is staring at the collage of theater posters and playbills. He looks up as he hears the door to Shylock’s room open and shut, and nods his head towards the display, which covers the greater portion of one of the walls. “Y’all saw all of these?”

“I was _in_ all of these.” Shylock moves to stand in next to Tom, facing the thing. “We kept back most of the posters from stuff we were supposed to be putting up for publicity. Most of the playbills are just doubles.”

“Damn, Shy,” Tom says. He starts counting under his breath. “Six, seven—hey, _I_ saw this!”

It’s a playbill for _The Drowsy Chaperone._ “That was the first one you could have seen, it was the first one I did with the university.”

He carefully detaches the playbill from the cork strip and hands it to Tom, who starts to flip through it.

"Know her, know her, know that guy, no idea who—wait, _what?_ ” Tom’s tone of voice sounds sort of like he was hit over the head with a baseball bat. Shylock cranes his head to see what he’s reacting to.

The playbill reads:

_NOACH SHYLOCK_

_Noach (Gangster #1) is a freshman majoring in Theatre (B. A.) and minoring in Business. His previous roles include Mr. Twimble/Womper in_ How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying _and Ensemble in_ Chicago _. He would like to thank his family and friends for their support, and his grandmother especially for driving for an hour and a half to watch him do a very bad impression of a Chicago accent._

Oh, his actor’s blurb. “Ha, I know, what the hell was I writing there—”

“What, no, that—that’s great, dude, no, I… Shylock isn’t your first name?”

There’s a slow, crawling pause where they both stare at each other in silence. Or, Shylock stares; Tom fidgets between staring at Shylock and staring at the playbill as if he expects to realize that he misread it.

Shylock opens his mouth to speak, and says “you?”, and then, after a small wheezing pause, manages to choke out “didn’t??” before breaking down completely into helpless giggling.

Tom looks entirely abashed. “I—I’ve known you for a year and I didn’t know your name, I, uh…”

Shylock wheezes.

“You… have a whole different actual first name, this is very weird.”

Shylock does not actually manage to stop giggling to ask “Fuck, Tom?”

“You… you’re. Noach?”

“Ohh, man.” Shylock pulls off his glasses to swipe at the corners of his eyes. “Yeah, you just have to say the C-H like in German.”

“Noach.”

Shylock gives him a delightedly sarcastic grin. “Nice to meet you.”


End file.
